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Europeans: Analyses of Public Opinion on EU Enlargement in Review The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ Europeans: Analyses of Public Opinion on EU Enlargement in Review Dimiter Toshkov, Elitsa Kortenska, Antoaneta Dimitrova and Adam Fagan No. 2 | April 2014 WORKING PAPER SERIES 2 | MAXCAP Working Paper No. 2| April 2014 MAXCAP Working Paper Series Edited by the MAXCAP Project „Maximizing the integration capacity of the European Union: Lessons of and prospects for enlargement and beyond” (MAXCAP) The MAXCAP Working Paper Series serves to disseminate the research results of the research consortium by making them available to a broader public. It means to create new and strengthen existing links within and between the academic and the policy world on matters relating to the current and future enlargement of the EU. All MAXCAP Working Papers are available on the MAXCAP website at www.maxcap-project.eu. Copyright for this issue: Dimiter Toshkov, Elitsa Kortenska, Antoaneta Dimitrova and Adam Fagan Editorial assistance and production: Christopher Hirsch and Nele Reich Toshkov, Dimiter/Kortenska, Elitsa/Dimitrova, Antoaneta/Fagan, Adam 2014: The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ Europeans: Analyses of Public Opinion on EU Enlargement in Review, MAXCAP Working Paper Series, No. 02, April 2014, „Ma- ximizing the integration capacity of the European Union: Lessons of and prospects for enlargement and beyond” (MAXCAP). ISSN 2198-7653 This publication has been funded by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme. Freie Universität Berlin MAXCAP „Maximizing the integration capacity of the European Union: Lessons and prospects for enlargement and beyond“ Ihnestr. 22 14195 Berlin Germany Phone: +49 30 - 838 57656 Fax: +49 (0)30 - 838 55049 This project has received funding from the European [email protected] Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under www.maxcap-project.eu grant agreement no 320115. 3 | MAXCAP Working Paper No. 2| April 2014 The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ Europeans: Analyses of Public Opinion on EU Enlargement in Review Dimiter Toshkov, Elitsa Kortenska, Antoaneta Dimitrova and Adam Fagan Abstract In this contribution we take stock of what existing public surveys and academic studies reveal about the state and about the determinants of the opinions, attitudes and evaluations of EU citizens about past and future enlargements of the EU. Our first conclusion from this overview is that EU public opinion is getting increasingly hostile towards the possibility of EU enlargement in the future. With regard to the Eastern enlargement, a plurality of EU citizens expressed a positive rather than a negative evaluation the last time they were polled in a EU–wide representative survey during 2008. Yet this weak net positive assessment already concealed a considerable dissatisfaction in many of the old member states. As of 2012, a majority of the European population expressed opposition towards future enlargements of the EU. Practically in all member states, and in some official candidates for membership as well, support has eroded since the early 2000s. It is quite significant that countries which had already low levels of net support in 2002 have found potential for additional decreases (e.g. France, Austria, Germany) and those starting from high levels have similarly followed the trend. Still, some of the prospective candidates for EU membership (e.g. Turkey, Albania) receive systematically lower levels of support than others, although the EU public has very low awareness of which countries are actually in the accession process. Altogether, the most recent surveys of EU public opinion outline a considerable “enlargement fatigue” among the EU citizens. Surveying the growing academic literatures which try to explain public attitudes towards enlargement, we find that both utilitarian (interest-based) and identity factors are considered influential. Furthermore, the influence of structural variables is complemented by the potential impact of media framing and cues provided by political parties. Determinants of public opinion do not appear to differ consistently between old and new member states although they are usually analyzed separately: a point the scholarship needs to be improved upon. The existing studies also find a significant gap in EU enlargement attitudes and evaluations between the elites and the general public. Several key findings which may partly explain the elite-public gap can be found in research on national and EU level media discourses. In particular, recent work has discovered a discontinuity between utilitarian national-level justifications of the last EU enlargement and common norms and values based EU-level justifications. This leads us to conclude that citizens’ opinions and perceptions of enlargement should be studied in the context of the discourses which influence them – a task we will undertake in the next stage of research for Work Package 3 of MAXCAP. 4 | MAXCAP Working Paper No. 2| April 2014 The Authors Dimiter D. Toshkov is assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University. He studied public administration at Sofia University ‘St. Cli- ment Ohridski’ and Leiden University. He completed his PhD at Leiden University in March 2009 with a dissertation on the implementation of EU law in the post-com- munist countries from Central and Eastern Europe. Currently, his major research project, supported by the Dutch Science Foundation, investigates the strategic in- teractions between the Commission, the ECJ and the member states in the con- text of enforcement of EU legislation. His other ongoing research focuses on the diffusion of tobacco policy in Europe, asylum policy, and decision making in the EU. Contact: [email protected] Elitsa Kortenska is a Ph.D. researcher at Leiden University, where she obtained her M.Sc. degree in Public Administration, specializing in crisis and security manage- ment. She worked as a reporter for Bulgarian radio and television, while comple- ting a double BA diploma in Political Science and International Relations as well as in Journalism and Mass Communications at the American University in Bulgaria. She is interested in research into public attitudes towards the European Union, EU policies and institutions and the EU eastern enlargements, as well as international migration flows, state-building and conflict prevention. Contact: [email protected] Dr. Antoaneta Dimitrova is associate professor at the Institute of Public Adminis- tration, coordinator of the Masters programme in Public Administration and aca- demic co-coordinator of the MAXCAP consortium. Her research covers, among others, the European Union’s eastern enlargement and relations with ENP states, democratization and administrative reform, coordination of EU policy making in the Eastern member states, the implementation of EU directives, cultural heritage policy. Her most recent publications deal with the implementation of the EU’s ru- les in the new member states in several policy areas, the EU and Ukraine, lessons learnt from the last enlargement and cultural heritage policy. Contact: [email protected] Adam Fagan is professor of European Politics at Queen Mary, University of London and research associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Europe’s Balkan Dilemma: Paths to Civil Society or State-building? (I.B. Tauris) and has published extensively on the impact of EU assistance and inter- vention in the Western Balkans. He is the editor of East European Politics. Contact: [email protected] 5 | MAXCAP Working Paper No. 2| April 2014 Contents 1. Introduction 6 2. Public Opinion and Evaluations of EU Enlargements 7 2.1 Assessing the Public Opinion Response to the Eastern Enlargement 7 2.2 The Prospects for Future Enlargements 10 2.3 The Candidate Matters 14 2.4 Attitudes in (Potential) Candidates for EU Accession from the Western Balkans 16 3. Explaining Attitudes towards EU Enlargement 20 3.1 Background 20 3.2 Individual-Level Factors 21 3.3 The Mediating Role of Political Context 25 3.4 The Effect of Media and Framing 27 3.5 Determinants of Attitudes towards Enlargement in the New Member States 28 3.6 Determinants of Attitudes towards Enlargement in Current and Potential Candidates 32 4. Conclusion 33 5. References 36 6 | MAXCAP Working Paper No. 2| April 2014 1. Introduction1 Throughout the history of the European Union, decisions on accession of new members, just like other major steps in integration, have been made by political elites represented by the governments of the mem- ber states and, in recent decades, the European Parliament. In the past, such decisions on enlargement, be it the famous informal veto of French President de Gaulle on UK membership (Moravscik 1998; Preston 1997), or the Council of Ministers’ decision to go ahead with Greek accession negotiations despite a nega- tive opinion by the European Commission (Preston 1997), have relied on the existence of “permissive con- sensus” (Hooghe/Marks 2005; Lindberg/Scheingold. 1970; Marks/Steenbergen 2004). Even today, when the institutional rules governing enlargement ensure a multitude of veto points, the opportunities to stop the process are mostly for constitutional veto players such as governments in office (during negotiations) and the European and national parliaments (during the ratification of accession treaties). EU enlargements have hardly ever been subject to referenda in the existing member states (the exception is France in 1972). Nevertheless, the obligation
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